Hello Everyone!
Hope your summer is going well! I cannot believe it is
already August. Anyways, my supervisor’s name is Andrea Severin, she is the
head of the interpretation department at the DMA and she attends A LOT of
meetings. She has 6 employees, 5 of them are on the DC3 Team, which is the
online project, and one was just hired before I started my internship to work
on the teaching ideas section for the online project. It is obvious that this
is an area that the museum is putting money into. Not just the interpretation department,
but the entire museum educational division has had two new positions added this
summer. The only employees she has are for the online project, so I assume that
leaves her for all of the interpretation items for the actual exhibitions in
the museum. That is a lot of work! I am not sure when she gets it all done
because she spends almost all of her days in meetings!
The meetings are something that has been surprising to me.
She has meeting after meeting after meeting. When does she get anything
actually worked out and done? I have been to a few with her and everyone talks
about what they want to get done, but when does it actually get done? This
leads me to wonder if she has to do work at home. All of the “one offs” I have
been doing are to help her with what she needs to do for every permanent
exhibition in the museum. I assume this why work for these exhibitions start a
year before they are actually installed and ready.
Surprise! Meetings, meetings, and more meetings is an extremely apt title for your post! The meeting culture is very, very common in the world of museums and it really does make you wonder why they are all necessary. You should ask Andrea sometime about whether she has to take work home. I would be curious to hear her answer. I would imagine that someone in interpretation would have to attend an obscene amount of meetings because of how many different departments you interface with (education, curatorial, exhibition design, etc.) and to make sure that you're on the same page as everyone you work with. Andrea must be a very patient woman to deal with all of the meetings! :)
ReplyDeleteI have been participating in meetings while at the Kimbell, and I must say that they are definitely not my most favorite part of my internship. They really do seem to be a waste of time, mostly, something that could have easily been done through an email. It seems that people tend to get off subject fairly quickly and you spend more time sitting there listening to someone talking about something besides what we are all there for. It's a fairly strange thing for me, I would just rather be told what needed to be done and let me do it, I'm pretty sure most of those meetings aren't necessary.
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